uch
encouraged by the species of revery which had possessed so zealous a
follower of the sports of the ancient Nimrod, who had been completely
surprised out of all doubts of the reality of the tale. Another of his
remarks gave me less pleasure. He detected the identity of the King with
the wandering knight, Fitz-James, when he winds his bugle to summon
his attendants. He was probably thinking of the lively, but somewhat
licentious, old ballad, in which the denouement of a royal intrigue
takes place as follows:

"He took a bugle frae his side,
He blew both loud and shrill,
And four and twenty belted knights
Came skipping over the hill;
Then he took out a little knife,
Let a' his duddies fa',
And he was the brawest gentleman
That was amang them a'.
And we'll go no more a roving," etc.

This discovery, as Mr. Pepys says of the rent in his camlet cloak, was
but a trifle, yet it troubled me; and I was at a good deal of pains to
efface any marks by which I thought my secret could be traced before the
conclusion, when I relied on it with the same hope of producing effect,
with which the Irish post-boy is said to reserve a "trot for the
avenue."

I took uncommon pains to verify the accuracy of the local circumstances
of this story. I recollect, in particular, that to ascertain whether I
was telling a probable tale, I went into Perthshire, to see whether King
James could actually have ridden from the banks of Loch Vennachar
to Stirling Castle within the time supposed in the poem, and had the
pleasure to satisfy myself that it was quite practicable.

After a considerable delay, The Lady of the Lake appeared in June, 1810;
and its success was certainly so extraordinary as to induce me for the
moment to conclude that I had at last fixed a nail in the proverbially
inconstant wheel of Fortune, whose stability in behalf of an individual
who had so boldly courted her favours for three successive times had not
as yet been shaken. I had attained, perhaps, that degree of reputation
at which prudence, or certainly timidity, would have made a halt, and
discontinued efforts by which I was far more likely to diminish my fame
than to increase it. But, as the celebrated John Wilkes is said to have
explained to his late Majesty, that he himself, amid his full tide of
popularity, was never a Wilkite, so I can, with honest truth, exculpate
myself from having been at any time a partis